July 2011 Entries

Two big announcements were made over the last week regarding Canadian conferences! Most of you may know that typically TechDays rolls through Canada in the Fall, but this year they’re limiting it to just Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto. Luckily there are two events that are filling the gaps for both central and eastern Canada. Prairie Developer Conference – Winnipeg The Prairie Developer Conference will be doing its first ever Winnipeg event this November 21 – 22! This two day conference features ......

Last week I was at the Microsoft WPC conference in Los Angeles. I’ve been to other Microsoft developer conferences like Tech Ed and PDC before, but this was my first WPC and it was a great experience. For one thing, the target audience is blatantly business, sales, and marketing. It was a weird feeling attending a Microsoft conference and not knowing *anybody* (although some familiar faces were found). I have links below to notes I made for the individual days of the conference, but I wanted to point ......

Last day of WPC, so what should we start with? You guessed it – KEYNOTES! But Thursday was all about the regional keynotes, so all the Canadian partners packed into a room to hear from Canadian Microsoft executives. In Canada there are three different groups within Microsoft Canada – Small/Medium Business, Enterprise Business, and DPE. While in the past partners were slotted into one of the different groups, now moving forward we’re all just identified as playing in a certain area, not committed ......

We kick off Day 4 at, you guessed it, another keynote (maybe they should rename this to the Worldwide Partner Keynote Conference?). We kick off with the Canadian Tenors singing some song they wrote for the Vancouver Olympics, and then a parade of partners carrying their country’s flag enters. I feel like I’m at Folklarama back in Winnipeg. ;) So today we have some big names speaking. Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s COO and Sir Richard Branson are on the schedule. Kevin Turner If you have never seen Kevin ......

The keynote session for the morning was a mixture of things. It started with an all-female rock band singing Cold Play’s “Viva la Vida”, then had all partners-of-the-year winners parade on stage, and then we got into the specific messaging part. There were five separate keynotes this morning from different business units within Microsoft. First up was Cloud. Note that I didn’t say Azure, although that’s part of it. Azure is the public cloud, but Microsoft talked up the Private Cloud a lot at this ......

A combination of lack-of-wifi, long bus rides, and no time to spare is getting me behind in my blog posts for WPC. Below is what happened the afternoon on Day 2 (Monday). I have lots more to post from yesterday and today, hopefully I get around to it tonight. Anyway, about Day 2… We were supposed to meet with some members of the Microsoft Digital Marketing team, but they no-showed (thanks guy! :\ ). That was ok though, as the wi-fi in the one-on-one meeting area was *way* better than the rest of ......

To kick off the WPC earlier today, Microsoft brought in Japanese artists New Order. They were fantastic, blending a version of the video below with some WPC-specific shots, and then coming live to the stage to perform a great dance number. The version of the song at WPC was in English, but still sounds great in its original language (if anyone finds video from the WPC performance, please post a link in the comments!) Update: Someone pointed out this video as well, and the performance at WPC used ......

I'm down in Los Angeles this week for my first ever Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference! This is the biggest industry conference I've ever attended, with more than 15000 people from around the world! It's also a bit different too because I don't know *anybody* here. WPC is more of a business/sales/marketing type of conference, not so much technical. As a result, its an entirely different crowd than the usual suspects at TechEd, PDC, etc. That's not a bad thing though! I'm meeting some great people ......

There’s a new format for TechDays 2011 this year. Damir posted all the details on the Canadian IT Pro blog, but in a nutshell: Only 3 cities this year: Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal Greater online content and year-long updating of content (so TechDays becomes an online content hub of sorts) While it is unfortunate that some cities aren’t going to get an event this year, I think there’s still some great opportunity within those markets. For instance in Winnipeg there’s already a group of us talking ......

One thing that’s really got me pumped about the Mango OS update is the inclusion of SQL Compact baked right in. We don’t need to include extra assemblies to get database functionality for our apps, as SQL Compact is a native component in Mango! Before we get all excited thinking we’ll have a full on visual designer experience when developing our apps, realize that this is still an isolate storage based data file that you’ll be using LINQ to SQL to access. There’s no visual designer (yet), which means ......